Here’s an update on what we’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks:

GNOME
We’ve been working on a patch for udisks to hide snaps from applications such as GNOME’s Disks. This will hide all loop devices, including installed snaps, from disk management utilities making it less confusing and less cluttered. We’ve reworked the patches a couple of times to align with the upstream developers suggestions and are still working on a few bugs. We hope that this will be merged upstream soon.https://github.com/storaged-project/udisks/pull/460

We’ve also been working with GNOME’s design team on some new sound options for Settings and Tweaks to add support for increasing the volume level above 100%.

Theme

Developers have been very busy on the community driven theme and it’s looking really sharp! You can follow along on the community hub: Mockups/new design discussions
Massive thanks to everyone working on the community theme. Keep an eye out for Didier’s blog post to get a good view of what’s coming.
We’ve also been working on the tidy up of the existing legacy theme with input from the Canonical design team, the community theme developers and Canonical developers. You can see the issues that are being addressed here: https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/desktop-design/issues/

Cups-filters 1.19.0 was released. This has taken over all new functionality from the driverless PPD generator of CUPS to the one in cups-filters, fixing color space/color depth determination in PPD generator. And in cups a bug has been fixed to resolve 16-bit high color depth in Apple Raster (AirPrint printers, most common driverless printing type).

LibreOffice’s release schedule is intentionally designed around Ubuntu’s release schedule so that new Ubuntu releases always include a new LibreOffice release. So yes, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will include LibreOffice 6.0.